Tourist Attraction - Artwork ? Gormley's "Another Place"

A benign day - off to Crosby to see Antony Gormley's Another Place as Sefton Council have voted to remove this extraordinary beachcape of 100 cast iron statues below and above the tideline on 3 kilometres of (usually deserted) Crosby Beach by the end of November.

They are all located South of the sewage outfall just North of the HM Coastguard look out at Hall Drive where there is a very busy car park complete with hot dog seller and ice cream van ... and extensive but temporary toilet facilities.
It's a holiday crowd, young gauche lovers photographing each other by the statues, noisy children, splashing in the puddle which the wave scour has provided for nearly every iron man.

Cyclists, joggers, dog walkers, irritating All Terrain Vehicles and overhead fleets of kites and a single powered hang glider.

The very busy main shipping channel runs in front of th beach, the men and the coastguard, pilots collected, container ships, guided into Seaforth Docks past the whirling onshore wind trubines. Offshore the Burbo Bank offshore wind farm takes shape with £10 MN of Lottery Funds - which Seimens, one of the largest companies in the world are happy to accept in payment.
Gormley was born in London in 1950, the youngest of seven children, to a German mother and devout Catholic Irish father, who ran the first pharmaceutical company to sign a contract with Alexander Fleming for the commercial production of penicillin. The family was wealthy, there was a cook and a chauffeur at the Hampstead Garden Suburb home overlooking the golf course, and Gormley's father was an art lover.

This location, has echoes therefore, near to Ampleforth where he was educated by the Jesuits before Cambridge and 3 years on the hippie trail in India - it was the denizens of the wealthy Fylde coast, the golf players at the East Lancashire Golf Club who will be happy to see the statues go and their unwelcome claque of admirers.

Crosby is being resurrected, building of swish flats, handy for the rapid rail line into Liverpool are rising relentlessly. Re vamped Victorian mansions are gentrified, split up or levelled. A new organic delicatessen / foodie shop "The Picked Walnut" opned 4 weeks ago.

"They bring the visitors in says the optimistic proprietor", but it's half term, "we miss the school run". The blonde, sunglassed pilots of the Islington Tractors having dropped offf the kids at the famous and hugely successful Merchant Taylors School. The proud mothers of the kids pushed into the network of feeder crammers picking up their Game pies, Turrills Asparagus Potato Crisps and a handy bottle of Barolo to remind them of Tuscany.

The crowds, are unwelcome. A close reading of this week's "Crosby News" confirms it. Eight to six the Council Committee voted. Fuck Sefton Council and Liverpool's European Capital of Culture celebrations looming in 2008 and the 4th Liverpool Biennial this Year.

Leave us in a Betjemanesque seaside, gentle pootering peace, inheritors of the fortunes built on shipping, and a long forgotten cotton trade.

The Statues ? Unimpressed.... but I found some uncommon fungi on the sandhills overlooking the Tiger Woods wannabes.